All posts tagged ‘shootings’

The same evening that the Newtown, Connecticut shootings took place, killing 20 children and 6 adults, my older son had friends over to decorate our Christmas tree. He put on a playlist of Christmas music he’d created to set the mood in the living room, and when Josh Groban’s “Believe” started to soar over our speakers, I burst into choking tears in the kitchen. When he was six, the age of most of the victims, my son would go starry-eyed whenever he heard that song. Remembering six, imagining losing one of my children… I didn’t know any of the affected families in Newtown personally, but I still cried.

Too, I was horrified, just days after I had written about my older son’s diagnosis for GeekMom, to see Adam Lanza referred to in the media as a young man with Asperger’s Syndrome — as if mass-murder were a logical outcome of a developmental disorder. As we talked about the Newtown tragedy at home, I refrained from sharing this one detail with my older son. He, in turn, did not tell me that he’d lost his temper with a classmate in science class and had been sent to the Dean’s office that first day back at school. That would not come out until we received a letter from his school three days later.